January 2015

We have just had another success with E-bay, one of our supporters reported in a rare live seahorse for sale on E-bay, which somehow got through the E-bay filter system and so we set Agent K on to the job. Agent K is head of our Illegal trade team (affectionately known as Agent K because we need to protect her identity) and she is brilliant and keeps on top of E-bay (Poor E-bay). After reporting the sale to E-bay , the team in charge of illegal sales at E-bay reacted very quickly and removed it. They also sent correspondence to the seller educating them about selling protected species on the site. Thank you so much to E-bay for reacting so quickly and thank you to Agent K for getting on the case and importantly thank you to our supporter who kindly reported the sale in to us. It is only by all of us working together that we can keep the lid on this trade and protect seahorses for the future

Dear all, please use Everyclick to search the Internet and help us generate funds. Every time you use Everyclick, if we are the nominated charity then we receive a penny. This might not sound much but we generated £200 in December with your help. If everyone used it this could be so much more.

It is easy to do, go the Everyclick page, register with them and nominate us as the charity you are supporting and then every time you do a search through Everyclick we benefit from it.

Make Every click your nominated search engine and this directly helps.

The more we can generate the more we can do.

Thank you so much and please go to the Every click link below to get started.

What a very lucky seahorse. Ali Newman and his Dad were walking along the beach at Tenby in wales on the last day of 2014 when they came across this very lucky seahorse washed up on the beach. With quick reactions Ali took a number of pictures of the juvenile female Spiny Seahorse and noticing she was still very much alive, he released her back into the sea, watching her swim off into the waves. Only Alis quick action saved this little seahorse and we are really grateful to him, saving the seahorse and then sending us all the information, so it can be recorded on the National Seahorse Database. Seahorses are found all around wales but it is not very often we get one washed up onto the beach. Cheers Ali for your quick thinking and saving the seahorse.

If you often buy and/or sell on eBay, then why not spend five minutes checking out any real seahorse(s) for sale and reporting them? It takes about three minutes to report any illegal sales you may see, and REALLY helps The Seahorse Trust in its work! (and please use the donate button and select The Seahorse Trust for us when you trade on E-bay, it all helps to keep the work going)

As you know, we have an ‘insider’ (affectionately known as Agent K) who regularly checks and then reports eBay ads, but even she is infallible and sometimes things like work, home or horses (her other passion!) prevent her from checking as often as she’d like. This is where YOU come in!

Just search on ‘seahorse’,‘seahorse keyrings’,‘seahorse lucite’ and ‘seahorse paperweight’ to see if you can spot any listings of real seahorses being sold within the UK or from abroad – but deliverable to the UK and Europe. Even while other countries still sadly allow the sales of seahorses within their own country, it is still ILLEGAL to sell them to buyers within Europe.

The ‘Report item’ button is on the right-hand side before the main text of the advertisement (to the right of the Postage tab). Just click on this, then on the ‘Prohibitedandrestricteditems‘ category, then ‘Animals, plantsandwildlife‘ for the report reason, and finally ‘Animals, animalparts, peltsorskins’ for the detailed reason. Click on Continue and then click on ‘Sendreport‘. All done, thank you!

If eBay gets a few duplicate notifications of illegal advertisements, then they may decide to tighten up on their filters that are supposed to prevent such ads appearing in the first place.

You also have the opportunity to give feedback at the bottom of any sales listing pages, so we’d urge you to politely point out that it is illegal for any real seahorse sales to be advertised on the UK version of eBay.

During 2014 alone, 100 illegal UK seahorse sale advertisements have been reported to eBay, with a further 92 being reported from foreign sellers trying to sell within Europe.

In the much shorter period of 20/9/13 to 31/12/13, a total of 148 ads were reported, so we ARE making a difference by informing eBay, who then withdraw the ad and therefore put off other would be sellers too!

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The Seahorse Trust was set up in 1999 as an umbrella organisation to preserve and conserve the natural world, especially the marine environment using Seahorses as our flagship species. We work in partnership through a Seahorse Alliance with many organisations and people from all over the world and it is this unique partnership that allows us to acheive so much in the conservation of seahorses and their enviornment for the future.